60 thoughts on “Yolks on You!”

  1. 💝Panel 1: Cranky says, “I’M TRYING TO ORDER NEW BATTERIES FOR MY DIGITAL WRISTWATCH.”

    💝Panel 2: Cranky says, “BUT THE CUSTOMER SERVICE PERSON I’VE BEEN TALKING TO JUST ASKED ME TO MARRY HER…”

    💝Panel 3: Pam says, “Dad, that’s ComicBookHarriet on Son of Stuck Funky. Say yes! Say yes!”

    💝💜💖🫂🌺💐🌹

  3. 9/24: The impression I end up getting is that we’re looking at what hoarders think of people who don’t see the point of clutter…or a small boy angry at Mommy for wanting him to get rid of his stash. If Peter Cadaldi can divest, so can Tom Batiuk.

    1. And that damned WordPress (or maybe Imgur) has changed how it works again. The link will take you to the image.

  7. here’s an edit of mine

    Fun facts involving the Sonic.exe universe

    • the characters that X kills in both SONIC 2011 and the Soulless Sonic (the sequel of SONIC 2011) series aren’t the actual Sonic characters, they’re the victims of X who are placed into Sonic vessels
    • “IT” is what X/Sonic.exe is referred as by X’s victims because they can’t see X as anything other than a monster (who can blame them?)
    • Alan is the name of the Tails vessel victim in the SONIC 2011/Soulless Sonic

      1. The fact that the Tails Doll, a more than minor unlockable character in the widely ignored and generally unloved (silly and overproduced soundtrack aside) Sega Saturn foot racing game Sonic R, became a Sonic horror fanfiction lore icon is a testament to the remarkable creativity of (and tremendous amount of free time available to) the online Sonic fan community.

        Oh the internet rabbit holes you fall down because you are one of the small handful of people who bought Sonic R and actually wanted to try and beat it…

        1. I played the original Sonic The Hedgehog on my old Sega Genesis when I was in college. I thought it was a lot of fun. But man, I just cannot imagine caring enough to know who all the side characters in all the offshoots are.

          But I also play Immactulate Grid for fun, and most of my answers are taken from my photographic memory of 1980s baseball cards. And you’ve all seen me gush about Pac-Man. So maybe what you’re obsessive about is a function of when you were born?

    2. a sequel to the above image:

      regarding the list of names in panel 3

      • Kyle Scott – Tom’s best friend and one of X’s victims
      • Tom Miller – the main protagonist of the original 2011 creepypasta and a minor character in the current canon (SONIC 2011/Soulless Sonic)
      • Alan – a victim of X inside a Tails vessel
      • Dave – a victim of X inside a Knuckles vessel
      • Paul – a victim of X inside a Dr. Eggman vessel, erased from existence in SONIC 2011
      • Gary – a victim of EXE (one of X’s creations and his “son”, both X and EXE are from the same universe) inside a Eggman vessel
      • Jake – a victim of EXE (one of X’s creations and his “son”, both X and EXE are from the same universe) inside a Metal Sonic vessel
      • Lucas – a victim of EXE inside a Tails vessel
      • Julie Donahue – a victim of X inside a Knuckles vessel
      • Alice – a victim of X who’s inside a Cream the Rabbit vessel
      • Chelsea Green – a victim of X who’s inside a Rouge The Bat vessel (she only exists in the original JC-the-Hyena canon)
      • Crystal – the main protagonist of Sonic.exe 2, the original sequel of Sonic.exe (story) when JC-the-Hyena was still the owner of Sonic.exe
      • Bradley – a scrapped character in the current Sonic.EXE/Soulless Sonic canon who’s vessel is that of Dr. Eggman (replaced by a yet-to-be named character who is the father of Alice in the Soulless Sonic canon who also was killed by X)

      1. I believe that’s why William Demarest replaced William Frawley on “My Three Sons.”

        And some think it was because Frawley didn’t know a habeas from a corpus!

  13. Today’s corny joke is actually pretty solid, I thought, but the punchline is underplayed and lands too softly. A stand-up comic with the right timing could make underplaying this punchline work, but it is a stronger bit in comic strip form if delivered with either genuine and obtuse irritation (as if they actually tried to get a deer that hit them to provide insurance information), or by a character who is a known cut-up.

    1. “They never have insurance.”

      That’s what the punchline needed to be. When Crankshaft just says “no insurance”, it’s not clear what doesn’t have insurance. The deer? Himself? The school system? Why wouldn’t the school system have insurance? Why is that a problem anyway, when he’s driving a publicly-owned vehicle in his offical capacity? It’s not his responsibility to pay for bus repairs. What is he even talking about?

      The punchline just needed a little clarity, and it would have worked fine. But this is the kind of writing mistake Tom Batiuk always makes. He thinks he’s being subtle and clever when he’s just being pointlessly vague.

  15. I think it’s possible to mine some humor from the premise that a “universal” remote requires a Very Special Battery, though the premise is weakened by the fact that (as any Plugger with a basket full of “universal” remotes that control everything except the device you bought it to control can tell you) nearly all remotes (including all “universal” ones, at least in my experience) use either AA or AAA batteries, and (as any Plugger with a big box of the Wrong Size can tell you) whichever size you have in the cupboard will the the size that doesn’t fit the remote. (Hey, look, I just made two Plugger panels here).

    But, in classic Batty style, he drops the premise in panel two. In panel three, where there should be a punch line, he gives us a meaningless word salad that manages to be not a joke, a pun, a malaprop, or any other form of humor, and completely unrelated to the setup in panel two. This is Prime Batty.

    1. The word “universal” really defeats the joke. If this was some obscure imported European TV, or even a fancy TV from the past, it might make sense for the remote to run on some obscure watch battery. (Which wouldn’t even be that difficult to find anymore.)

      It’s yet another example of how Batiuk just stuffs words into the balloons without thinking about what they imply. And how he acts like it’s still 1986.

  16. Alternate third panel to CBH’s second strip: “Shh! You’re not supposed to know about the hen’s teeth until I finish my experiments to genetically modify chickens into dinosaurs!”

    Nah. That would require Batty to know that some beaked dinosaurs also had teeth.

  17. Anyway, with “ICE 6”, we get the thrilling conclusion to Batiuk’s…

    Oh, wait. He didn’t post the last strip. Gosh, I wonder why? I’m sure it has nothing to do with his assertion that he was posting the story due to “current events”, yet the finale showed the ICE agents as just regular decent folks who love themselves some Montoni’s pizza. (Actually… I honestly can’t say why Batiuk didn’t post it. I mean, it COULD be because of how far off from “current events” it would make him look, but… it’s not like he normally demonstrates that level of self-awareness, so who even knows?)

    (Also, that thing went on for FIVE WEEKS, not counting the “Adeela gets her driver’s license” story. Guess “stories shouldn’t last more than three weeks” doesn’t count when you’re making desperate award bait. Not that there was anything close to five weeks of story there, just lots of idiocy, illogic, and padding.)

    (Amazingly, he DID fix the Flash Fridays for #343, so at least he managed to do something right.)

    1. I did enjoy what i guess is the forward to Strike Four!. I always said he should stick with the Cranky/Baseball connection for continuity, audience appreciation and just the small-town Americana of it all. I wonder why he stopped?

      “I get how my partner in cartooning on Crankshaft, Chuck Ayers, is a huge baseball fan…”

      oh

  18. Not just consecutive strips… but technically consecutive panels.

    Magnificent, Davis… Simply magnificent.

    1. No, no, Andy, it’s “How are your grandson, Max, and his partner, Hannah, making out running the old Valentine theater, where they only showed The Phantom Empire until it closed down, became a strip club, and was bought out by Hollywood star Mason Jarre as a money laundering operation and put them back in charge for reasons inexplicable to man?” Come on, man, exposition is everyone’s job, and there’s clearly room to cram more words in that panel. Sheesh.

      (Hannah is Max’s Generic Trophy Blonde’s name, right?)

      2. My thinking was that Crank would reply with “Which grandson? The grown up one running the theater or my other grandson that’s the son of my grandson?” Since he seems to be allergic to the phrase “great-grandson” these days.

      3. This speaks to a problem: Batiuk somehow contrives to make all the things that appeal to him sound even more boring than they actually are.

  23. Flash Fridays #344 is up, and… man, this is some peak Batiuk right there.

    https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/flash-fridays-the-flash-344-april-1985/

    So for those playing along at home, we’re still in “The Trial of the Flash” (and will be for the next six issues, until the series ends). Kid Flash has been called by the prosecutor to testify.

    Writer/editor Cary Bates then does something rather cool. Before any action can take place, he takes us back to Kid Flash’s origin… quite literally. Rather than choosing to recreate, he chooses to reprint. And it works like a charm.

    The issue then segues into ANOTHER flashback/reprint. Almost the entire issue is recycled material, representing Flash’s thoughts about Kid Flash. Batiuk even describes the original material as encompassing maybe two minutes of time. AND HE LOVES IT.

    A couple of last thoughts. The issue plays brilliantly with the reprinted material beautifully buttressing the current work. Not a cheat at all. That being said, if it was contrived to make up some time on the schedule it couldn’t have been done any better. 

    The seventh-to-last issue, and they did a fill-in reprint? And you’re PRAISING it?

    Y’know, for some reason, Davis’ “art” on Crankshaft makes a LOT more sense now. (Not to mention that week we saw Girl Les wandering around the places Batiuk used to live. Or, really, and of the other examples of blatant padding we could name.) I really don’t think we could denigrate him any more than his own words can.

    1. It’s people like him that made someone make a smart remark about Marvel coming up with something called Last Week’s Comics because the Marvel zombies would buy them too.

      1. Why not? After all, the Marvel zombies bought up multiple series called Marvel Zombies, didn’t they?

    2. It’s a bit odd to me, because TB very rarely reused artwork in Act II and in much of Act III when doing his incessant Act I flashbacks. There was so much opportunity, but instead he redrew panel after panel of sepia-toned Act I material.

      Perhaps the fact that Ayers penciled most of those strips made it easier… and/or TB’s artwork having drifted significantly from even late Act I by the late 90s made it seem necessary (in contrast, the occasional flashbacks to huge-head early Luann don’t seem to bother Greg Evans much)… but still, he did once put in the extra work he is now having an artist not do and also praising another for not doing. Strange indeed.

  26. Today’s Crankshaft

    How I feel whenever it’s Most Boringest Interview Ever Week and Whiny Manbaby Jeff Murdoch decides to walk into the storyline to discuss useless shit with Batton:

    1. To paraphrase The Amazing Colossal Man’s Col. Glenn Manning, “What sin could a comic strip readership commit in a single lifetime to bring this upon themselves?”

  27. There was a KID Flash? The mind boggles. Was his best friend a Norwegian named Ole Jimmson, The Flash’s Pal?

  28. Tomorrow: “Well, I’ll be! If it isn’t my triplegänger, Les Moore! Sure hope Putin doesn’t choose this exact moment to drop a nuke on Centerville!”

    (But kudos to Bats for remembering the umlaut on Doppelgänger.

    Sincererly,
    B.D.I. DiNytpicker.)

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